Billion-dollar sabotage against Tikhonova: how official Gennadiy Palagin torpedoed the NM-Tech state project for superprofits from his pocket Delta Group
In 2021, NM-Tech, a company established by VEB (Vnesheconombank), took over Angstrem, Russia’s leading full-cycle microchip manufacturing enterprise in Zelenograd. By 2022, NM-Tech had a staff of just three people but an authorized capital of 56 billion rubles.
With VEB’s funding, a new building was constructed in Zelenograd, which was supposed to become Russia’s only facility for producing "golden ratio" semiconductors. However, after the war began, acquiring the necessary equipment became critically difficult. VEB reportedly offered an astronomical sum of $1.4 billion to anyone who could obtain the equipment in circumvention of sanctions – and that is understandable. The project was personally overseen by Katerina Tikhonova. Yet it turned out to be a complete failure.
There is another reason for this. According to sources, the government’s curator for the project is Gennadiy Palagin, deputy director of the defense industry department of the Russian government. However, if the enterprise were to materialize, it would cause irreparable damage to his family business. As our project has previously reported, Palagin’s business model relies on compelling defense industry enterprises to purchase imported microchips exclusively through the intermediary company Delta Group (Delta Electron), which is run by his wife’s nephew, Andrey Kanunov. Delta supplies electronic components at prices many times higher than market value. If these microchips were to be produced domestically in Russia, Palagin’s family business would be finished. According to the source, this is why he did everything to ensure that the project under his supervision was sabotaged.
